Intentional Practice OR My first 33 days of Instructional Design at Davidson College OR #336699

It is business day 33 at my new job as “Instructional Designer – Quantitative Applications” as part of the Davidson College WildCat tech team. These first weeks have been full of fun events across campus and I feel quite lucky to be warmly welcomed by people here in the Technology and Innovation team, as well as a bunch of faculty, staff, librarians, students, and alumni at various events across campus. It may seem weird to have the exact day count at 33, but ever since I started as an Instructional Designer at UPEI several years ago, I have slotted out my time in 30/60 and 100 day chunks. I thank Dave Cormier for this, as he tasked me at the beginning of my time at UPEI to set goals for each of those marks, and then reset once you get to 100 and do it all again. Having clear markers of some sort is very important. Especially when you’re working in such an odd field as Instructional Design. Whenever someone asks me what I do and I say I’m an ID, it is usually met with confusion and a lot of explaining. But I will talk about this elsewhere.

As day 30 approached, I decided to break my time into 33/66/99 chunks instead of 30/60/100. I won’t break down the logic for this, but it has made me really pay attention to each day and where it falls inside the intervals. Mostly this also helps me to get a feel for what I have done, what I’m looking to do, and what is a bit further off down the line. My main goal when working with people is to amplify their work in the open. When I first meet people I use a variety of frameworks to begin our work together. Using these frameworks, I try to get as much of the work into the open and in my first 33 days here I have found many opportunities to do this. Although A LOT has happened in my first 33 days, I am going to briefly outline 6 projects/classe I’m involved in that have at least parts in the open and how I am excited for their trajectories. Each project will be broken down into: BACKGROUND, NEXT STEPS, and HOW MANY DAYS UNTIL NEXT PROJECT.

Religion 238 – Islamic Cities

BACKGROUND

Religion 238 is a class taught bi-annually by Rizwan Zamir. He has taught the class several times and decided over a year ago that he wanted to use a larger visual component to the course. To (very roughly) paraphrase Rizwan:

Using only text to get to the intricacies of how a city can be a spatial reflection of the empire and religion it is a part of has its limitations. By using some type of mapping assignment, we are able to better represent the actual experiences of people in the city and in the empire.

From my side, I came into the class on my Day 4 (!) which was VERY near the end of the semester. By that point, students had already divided into groups, chosen the cities they were going to map, and done most of their research. There were only 3 weeks left in the semester with students working in different environments as they prepared for final presentations. It was fun to get to work with each group on how to build out their presentations and to learn a bunch of stuff about Mecca, Istanbul, and Jerusalem.

NEXT STEPS

This course won’t be offered again until 2018-2019 so we have a bunch of time to prepare and rethink some approaches. Brian Little and I will be the Instructional Designers working on this project – we’re both pretty pumped to say the least. Also of great interest is that Rizwan is going to start an OER text/site/something based on his Islamic Mysticism in Spring 2017! (Will defo report on this later!)

HOW MANY DAYS UNTIL NEXT PROJECT

99ish for the OER part. 399ish for the next REL238 section.

History 306: WOMEN AND GENDER IN U.S. HISTORY TO 1870

BACKGROUND

In my second week here, I was invited to meet with Rose Stremlau about a digital mapping project she wanted her students to do for her HIS 306 class. Over the semester her students transcribed letters from the Davidson Archives written by Mary Lacy from 1855 – 1860. Rose wanted to get some ideas for interesting projects where students could reflect on the letters in a variety of ways. We decided on three separate outputs: word clouds, topographical maps, and blog posts with scans of the letters. Not all of these were shared in the open by students, but the blog itself is a worthy and interesting read. Many of the details make good yarn. And the student reflections are top notch.

NEXT STEPS

Rose is just great fun to work with and we have a few things on both front and back burners. What seems interesting about the HIS 306 class is that the focus will be a bit different each time, so every time it is offered students will make some cool stuff and (hopefully!) share in the open on teh internetz!

HOW MANY DAYS UNTIL NEXT PROJECT

99ish days until Rose’s Fall 2017 courses – I am sure we’ll do something then. Meanwhile, over the summer Rose has alluded to a couple of UBER interesting projects. Stay tuned and I’ll share as it comes up.

BACKGROUND

There is a reimagining of how the Humanities are being taught/taken at Davidson. At the end of my second week here, I was invited to take part in a workshop with this as part of the email:

Design session, definitions, short-term and long-term goals, planning, brainstorming, course building, thinking about recruiting, connecting to campus programming, and more. Thinking about our theme for the next three years: REVOLUTION

Those who know me know I LOVE this kind of workshop. I haz all the ideaz! They’re not all GREAT ideas. Some are quite the opposite, but I haz them all. Needless to say it was a VERY FUN exercise. We (meaning @sundilu and I) were brought in primarily to figure out what type of digital mapping/timelining/whatever-ing would happen during the course. We’re still not 100% on what that will look like, but what we did get those 2 days was intros to a bunch of great people.

Of particular fun-ness for me was intros to most of the fellows. There are 10 student fellows who are going to help out during the fall and spring sections. One of my main side projects over the last month has been herding them up individually to make short “promo” videos that are both on the Humanities site and the HUMDavidson youtube channel.

NEXT STEPS

We’re working with a few peeps on campus to make sure that #HumDavidson gets a good look by incoming freshman. Of course, we’ll also be working with the team of faculty teaching the course and the fellows on varied critical instructional design approaches.

HOW MANY DAYS UNTIL NEXT PROJECT

We’ll be visiting this regularly over the summer, but 99ish is when the course kicks off! Of course, I’ll report back before and after then on how its going.

Whats this all mean?

Somehow I lost the thread of what my intention was with this post at the very beginning. It was intended to talk about how I am going to be intentional in my practice here and as a response to this post. So here it goes – every 33 business days I plan on updating and adding to a conversation about projects new and old whilst using #336699 and #instructionaldesign. Although this series is not meant to detail/outline/share ALL THE THINGS, it will give a glimpse into some efforts made to be more open and a window into some design processes.